Thursday, November 03, 2005

I'm not sure if I'm the most particular in our group about keeping track of games, but I must be up there with the top tier. I keep track of all games played, and my game collection, in Excel spreadsheets.

For game plays, I not only keep a record of the game played, but also the date, order of play, who played, who won and my rating after that play. Looking back over the ratings they really don't change much, but there have been a few movers. Age of Steam is perhaps the one with the biggest swing. I _really_ didn't like that game when I first played it, but after several playings it's now one of my favorites. Maharajah is another that it took several playings to warm to. For those dying to know, I played 255 games in 2003, 383 in 2004 and 332 in 2005 so far.

In my games collection, I have 227 games listed. These are tracked by year purchased, cost, number of times played (by year), and average cost/play. I also calculate the totals for each year and oveall - total played, total different games played, games added and %age of game collection played that year.

I bought 18 games in 2002 (my first Euro purchases), 77 in 2003, 39 in 2004 and 86 so far this year. (73 of those were Essen - I'd been restricting my buying impulse earlier in the year.) In each year I have played 9 (50%), 43 (45%), 85 (63%) and 89 (39%) of the games in my collection by the end of the year, with an overall of 144 (63%). Any game that either hasn't been played this year, or at all, is color coded red. (Excel conditional formatting is useful!)

I also track the total average cost/play of my games, currently $9.17. As I track the initial cost of a game (including shipping) and the number of times it's been played I can calculate the average cost/play for each game. (Coloretto has the current lowest average cost/play, with $0.57.) Any game that has an average cost/play more than twice the total average cost/play is also colored red.

These red coded games are the ones that I target to get on the table if possible. The more red, the more I try to target it. Some of the perhaps more surprising 'red' ones are Big City ($25.20 average cost/play - recent acquisition), Domaine ($33.92) El Grande (0 plays), Elfenland ($19.98), Puerto Rico (0), Tigris & Euphrates ($18.43), and Union Pacific (0).

I keep track of what I play, and I've attempted to keep track of number of players and winner, but I couldn't maintain that level of detail.

I figured that if I'm not interested in maintaining that level of tracking, I'm not interested in the data. And given that I usually play games to enjoy the games and the company - and not as a competitive endeavor, I figure just knowing what I've played is enough.